(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Getting superstars into a room to form a supergroup is no easy feat. It’s bad enough to try to separate the members from their respective acts, but sometimes the stars align and every single person is in the same room together. But with the Traveling Wilburys, it seemed like everyone was in the studio to have a laugh with their friends rather than come together to make a record.
Before any of the band members played together, they were already some of the finest musicians anyone could have asked for. Each of them were doing just fine on their own, but George Harrison had the idea to see if they had what it took to be a group together when discussing his favourite acts with Jeff Lynne. And by the time they started putting their first track together, everything was falling into place.
Bob Dylan had the studio, Harrison had the song, and all he needed was Roy Orbison and Tom Petty to come join the party once ‘Handle With Care’ was being laid down. But as much as people like the idea of working with their friends, it was only a matter of time before their schedules started to clash with each other.
While Lynne had made the studio his home for the foreseeable future after working with legends like Brian Wilson, the rest of the album was a run-and-gun operation working out of Dave Stewart’s house. And when it came time to get everyone together in one place, the entire band remembered trying to squeeze everything into place when Dylan came down for those few days.
It might not have been the hardest thing in the world to cobble together a few tunes, but the biggest hurdle was to get them out before Dylan went on tour, with Petty saying, “Bob was on the road. We had to really plan to get sections of time because he likes to tour a lot. But we just knew at the time there was no reason why we couldn’t have a band that did whatever it wanted to.”
Although Dylan might not be as dominant on the first record, what he brought to those sessions did leave everyone with a few great moments. ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ is still among the best tunes that he or Petty ever penned, and while his voice is a lot gruffer than the rest of them, hearing him sing on tracks like ‘Dirty World’ is a lot more interesting when having his fellow Wilburys as backup singers.
In fact, the idea of him working well with every member of the group is practically a miracle. Dylan was never the kind to work the best with others outside of maybe The Band, and despite looking like he would have rather been anywhere else in the ‘Handle With Care’ video, it’s easy to hear him having a ball among his bandmates when tearing some of their later material as well on ‘Wilbury Twist’.
No artist can manage to keep Dylan in one place for too long, but the biggest appeal of the Wilburys was that they were never supposed to have a set agenda. They did whatever they wanted, and since the fans were more than happy to hear them all playing, they would gladly strum away on their guitars and play whatever suited them at the time.
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